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Game of Thrones: Jon Snow’s Real Name Has Surprising Ramifications

This post contains frank discussion of Game of Thrones Season 7, Episode 7, “The Dragon and the Wolf.” If you’re not caught up or don’t want to be spoiled, now would be the time to leave. Seriously, I won’t warn you again. Skedaddle.

After seven seasons of calling him “Jon Snow,” Game of Thrones fans may have a hard time making the switch. But according to this week’s finale, Jon’s first name is not Jon, nor is it the popular Season 6 guess “Jaeharys.” Nope: his real name is Aegon. Thanks to Gilly’s annulment reading material, a flashback to the wedding of Rhaegar and Lyanna, and his mother’s dying words, we also know that Jon’s last name is Targaryen.

So he’s not the first Aegon Targaryen to be cloaked in destiny, and he may not be the last. But aside from the historical significance of Jon’s cumbersome new moniker (we support you just sticking with Jon), there are some book clues about a different Aegon that might hint at more trouble in paradise for new lovers Jon and Daenerys. We’ll get there, but let’s start first with brief bit of history, shall we?

The Most Famous Aegon: Daenerys’s ancient ancestor, Aegon, is probably the most famous Targaryen in Westerosi history. With flowing blonde hair, three dragons, and a taste for incest, Aegon the Conqueror came to Westeros from Essos and became the continent’s ultimate ruler. Sound familiar?

That table map in Dragonstone belonged to Aegon. He built the Iron Throne out of the swords of his enemies and united the various warring factions of Westeros into one quarrelsome kingdom. He’s the closest thing they have to a founding father. Daenerys is styling herself after Aegon in a number of ways (including that incest thing), but hopes to be a kindler, gentler ruler than even he was by. . .“breaking the wheel?” To be honest, her campaign promises are pretty vague. All that matters is that Aegon Targaryen is a name just boiling over with destiny.

The More Significant Aegon: But perhaps the more important Aegon as it pertains to this particular story is Rhaegar’s other son—the one he had with his first wife, Elia Martell. If you remember, when Oberyn Martell showed up to King’s Landing in Season 4, he was looking for justice for what happened to his sister, Elia. “You raped her,” he repeated before he died. “You murdered her. You killed her children.”

Those children of Elia Martell were killed by Gregor Clegane, a.k.a. The Mountain, during the Sack of King’s Landing towards the end of Robert’s Rebellion. They were named Aegon and Rhaenys. Thoros of Myr brought up the dead bodies of young Rhaenys and Aegon as evidence against Sandor Clegane back in Season 3.

If Rhaegar already had one son named Aegon, why did he then have another? Well, though Rhaegar seems like a nice enough fellow despite leaving his wife Elia for a teenaged Lyanna, he was also a bit of a prophecy nutjob. He was convinced that he needed a third child to fulfill a prophecy involving three dragon riders. Daenerys has this vision of her brother, Elia, and the first baby Aegon in A Clash of Kings:

The man had her brother’s hair, but he was taller, and his eyes were a
dark indigo rather than lilac. “Aegon,” he said to a woman nursing a
newborn babe in a great wooden bed. “What better name for a king?”
“Will you make a song for him?” the woman asked. “He has a song,” the
man replied. “He is the prince that was promised, and his is the song
of ice and fire.” He looked up when he said it and his eyes met Dany,
and it seemed as if he saw her standing there beyond the door.

If we like, we can now apply all of that portentous language to Jon/Aegon instead. But in Dany’s vision, Rhaegar continues by complaining that two children—Aegon and Rhaenys—aren’t enough.

“There must be one more,” he said, though whether he was speaking to her or
the woman in bed she could not say. “The dragon has three heads.” He
went to the window seat, picked up a harp, and ran his fingers lightly
over its silvery strings. Sweet sadness filled the room as man and
wife and babe faded like the morning mist, only the music lingering
behind to speed her on her way.

We already know Rhaegar found a way to have the third baby that Elia could not (her health was too weak) by running off with Lyanna and starting a war. Small price to pay for the prince who was promised, right? The children Aegon and Rhaenys as well as their father, Rhaegar, were all dead by the time Lyanna gave birth to Jon/Aegon in the Tower of Joy.

Aegon is a crazy thing to name a Targaryen child; it’s like naming an American kid George Washington or John Kennedy. But perhaps Lyanna wanted to pay homage to Rhaeger’s over-inflated sense of destiny by giving this baby the same name as his poor, dead older brother.

The Fake Aegon: But here’s where things get a little complicated for book readers and Jon Snow, so bear with me. In George R.R. Martin’s novels, there is a character named Young Griff who swears that he is Aegon Targaryen, a.k.a. the son of Elia Martell and Rhaegar Targaryen. In the books, Varys claims he swapped young baby Aegon with a peasant child and smuggled the secret Targaryen to safety. This is who Varys and Illyrio Mopatis are plotting to put on the throne in place of the Baratheons. This is the great hope of the Targaryen Restoration. Just like the Skywalkers, in the books there is another Targaryen. In the show, however, Daenerys is Varys’s great blonde hope.

But the HBO series decided to cut this character from its version entirely, and gave parts of his story (including a terrifying encounter with Stone Men in old Valyria and a nasty case of greyscale) to other people on the show. Many book fans suspect the reason showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss cut Young Griff, a.k.a. Aegon, from the show is because he will wind up being inconsequential to the story. In other words, like many characters in the book suspect, Young Griff is a fake Aegon. (Readers lovingly refer to him as fAegon.)

Young Griff’s story line ends up taking over a lot of the narrative in A Dance with Dragons, but there are also those in Westeros who doubt that this Aegon is truly a Targaryen. In a released chapter from Martin’s upcoming bookThe Winds of Winter, a Dornish knight scoffs at the idea, saying, “Gregor Clegane ripped Aegon out of Elia’s arms and smashed his head against a wall. If Lord Connington’s prince has a crushed skull, I will believe that Aegon Targaryen has returned from the grave. Elsewise, no. This is some feigned boy, no more. A sellsword’s ploy to win support.”

So, why include fAegon in the books at all if he will eventually be exposed as a pretender? Well, some suspect Young Griff is just another stalling tactic Martin is using to pad out his series. As Martin told io9 back in 2013, his original concept for A Song of Ice and Fire was to start the story when Jon, Bran, Arya, etc., were children and end with them as adults. But he found time was passing a little too slowly in his writing: “you end a book, and you’ve had a tremendous amount of events—but they’ve taken place over a short time frame, and the eight-year-old kid is still eight years old.”

Initially, Martin planned to solve that problem with a five year time jump. But he eventually abandoned that idea, and instead has drawn out the narrative in other ways to allow Bran, Arya, et. al. to age up. Rapidly aging kids has not been a similar problem on HBO’s version of Game of Thrones. Martin defended some of this padding in the later books during that same io9 interview:

I get complaints sometimes that nothing happens—but they’re defining
“nothing,” I think, differently than I am. I don’t think it all has to
be battles and sword fights and assassinations. Character development
and [people] changing is good, and there are some tough things in
there that I think a lot of writers skip over. I’m glad I didn’t skip
over these things.

But even if he’s a fake, Young Griff will have to be serve some kind of narrative purpose in the novels before he’s exposed as a fraud, won’t he? And this is where we come back to Jon. As Rhaegar’s sons, both Griff/Aegon and Jon/Aegon have a better claim on the Iron Throne than their aunt Daenerys. Many suspect Griff/Aegon will pose a real challenge to her plans to conquer Westeros. Will that challenging role go to Jon/Aegon instead?

It’s a difficult scenario to envision. Jon is neither power-hungry nor generally treacherous enough to do that to Daenerys. Additionally, if these two can look past the incest thing, there’s such a simple solution to their issue: marriage. Still: the books present us one character named Aegon Targaryen who threatened Dany’s claim to the throne, and now the show has provided us another. It’s hard not to think these storylines will be somehow related as the Song of Ice and Fire wraps up.